The racialized reproductive politics of forced adoptions as child welfare in Denmark

Over the recent years, forced adoptions as child welfare policy in Denmark has been of growing interest politically. While Danish law on adoption has included a paragraph since 1972 making it possible to conduct an adoption without the consent of parents in cases where it is in the interest of the child, a change in the law in 2015 making it easier for municipalities to conduct forced adoptions have caused a large rise in the number of cases since. In may 2021, a majority of parties in the Danish parliament reached agreement on a reform of the child welfare system which makes pre-natal forced abortions possible. The political argument for forced adoptions is to create “continuity” for children, who might otherwise, it is argued, spend their childhood placed in different foster families. In the Danish foster care system, children with non-western background are overrepresented, and Greenlandic children are heavily overrepresented – with seven times as many Greenlandic children ending up in foster care. The NGO “Greenlandic children” warns that the plan to increase forced adoptions might make Greenlandic families in Denmark even more vulnerable to interventions from municipalities. This happens at a time where the colonial history of the “Greenlandic experiment” haunts the Danish public debate – in the experiment in 1952, Danish colonial authorities removed 22 Greenlandic children from their families in Greenland, and placed them in foster families in Denmark. This paper looks at the recent legal changes on the field of adoptions as child welfare policy in Denmark as well as political discourse in the debate around these legal changes, and verdicts in cases on forced adoption that has been judged in court, and through this, analyses forced adoption as a as racialized form of reproductive governance in the postcolonial welfare state.